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First POST: Upvoted

Republican-affiliated campaign "viral videos" are "dominating" YouTube and Facebook, reports Darren Samuelsohn for Politico, though a close reading of his article shows that in a number of cases their so-called "viraiity" is either overstated or based on negative attention.

Twitter is suing the US government for the right to tell its users the exact number of national security letters and Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court orders it has received, "in a meaningful way, rather than in broad, inexact ranges," its legal VP Ben Lee blogs.

Whatever happens with the FCC's pending decision on its "open Internet" rules, there will be lawsuits, Edward Wyatt reports for the New York Times.

Airbnb is finally legal in San Francisco, thanks to a vote of the city council, but the law comes with all kinds of restraints, including a 90-day time limit on non-hosted rentals and the creation of a public registry for hosts, reports Kim-Mai Cutler for TechCrunch.

Upvote this: Spain's newest political party, Podemos, is building itself on a backbone of group collaboration platforms Reddit and Loomio, Jonathan Blitzer reports for The New Yorker. Indeed, as our Carola Frediani reported for techPresident two months ago, Podemos is rapidly becoming the most interesting Internet-powered political party in the world.

Facebook's VP for public policy in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, Richard Allan, talks to Global Voices about how the company is handling takedown requests in the Ukraine and Russia, where the company is caught in the middle of an online war of words. He notes, "Sometimes we make mistakes…at the scale at which we operate, that can sometimes be an issue."

Deep thinking: Is the prevalence of social networking altering how we distribute our limited social capital, widening our circle of acquaintances through virtual means but reducing the number of face-to-face friends we have? Or, even more momentous, are our brains being rewired so we can manage more virtual friendships but fewer close ones? That's what writer Maria Konnikova suggests in this fascinating post for The New Yorker, which is centered on the ongoing research of Robin Dunbar into the physiology of friendship.